52 ""- I , / ! '.. f fA .; .f , r · , If .t ?> h -' - " , '"!>( "t."*"' "IJ( \ !\ . ::; ", ! \ J :-", ., - .{. \, -.$' ! ,'\ ,.:'" J < J 0.. 'o/ ^ .øt ' 1""" ' , , , .>' 1\ ' . ,,-.- 4' Á4 i ;-. . ' ' . f ,..... ÀI'>%, . Þ' ' 'II< ".. . f. '; t $ ý ... ''* , $<' .... J,. . if , .( . t .0" (J.$. , --- f-4 , . - ^'>- .,1c- 'f C;, .i C . "', v. c; '''>..#' < !I J. .<.,. . 1 f. ",: '$0'" "Y w ý*' t -.' ,ø A :_: N">>.,. , ?I' ffi' -*. ! r IØ ,.- l' t. M#! .. . .'- \<. 'i ì -- Ji""" t .) '\ "" J ';r \ "'. Ft::. -<it /' "This is one of the places where we hide weapons, food, and radios in case the country is taken over by clean-air and animal-rig hts extremists." . be very different now. Korotich assem- bled them and said, "I don't want you bringing in articles on anything that you don't talk about at home. If a subject does not interest you, it does not interest me." Then he began recruiting young reporters, and within a few months he had acquired four who were twenty-seven or younger. "Ogonyok wasn't a soccer team, but I felt it needed fresh blood-young reporters," he says. "It wasn't easy getting them- not with the traditions of Ogonyok. I wanted an anti-chauvinistic journal, and that hadn't ever existed in this country. I started to interview indepen- dent political figures without asking anyone's permission. Sometimes Gor- bachev would call me, sometimes I would call him. I wanted to help him, but I also wanted to be independent of him. It is hard for an American to understand the full significance of this: we were making our own decisions." . On arriving, Korotich had found a lot of deadwood on the staff His first step-"literally," he says-was to per- suade the Party to retire those people with pensions and privileges. "I knew I had to get that done in the first two weeks or so before anything the Party didn't like had appeared in the magazine," he says. After getting the Party's agreement, Korotich says, he called a staff meeting and disclosed the details. "I told half the staff mem- bers they would be leaving with pen- sions and privileges," he says. "And I then said, in effect, 'You are lucky to be leaving like this, because I would have fired you either way. Let's all be friends.' " Korotich says that another problem in the early days was the inflow of unsolicited pieces from Party members or aspirant writers with Party connec- tions. He rejected such material, and instead set a course that seemed bound /' to land him in trouble. In the summer of 1987, 0 gonyok printed a piece about Georgi Markov, the head of the writ- ers' union and a favorite Korotich tar- get. "We said he had opened a museum in his honor in his native village," Korotich told me. "We said it was wrong for a bad writer to create a museum in his own honor-one with paintings and sculptures of himself. Pravda, the voice of God, attacked us for that piece. The Central Committee then called, ordering me to reprint that attack in 0 gonyok. I called my board together." After the board met, Korotich got in touch with the Central Committee and reported that Pravda's piece would not be reprinted, because his board had voted against reprint- ing it. "Pravda then got seven writers to say in a letter that Vitaly Korotich was opposing socialism and must be stopped by the government," Korotich told me. He rej ected the charge in the letter, and nothing happened. He then attacked Viktor Afanasyev, who was Pravda's editor at the time, for having portrayed himself as a foe of Brezh- nev's. "I proved that he had been a the- oretician under Brezhnev," Korotich said. And did all this boost circulation? "It helped," Korotich said. "And afterward it became normal for some other journals to oppose the Central Commi ttee. " The Soviet military soon became a target of 0 gonyok-an enduring one. "In November of 1988, we attacked General Dmitri Yazov, the Minister of Defense, for his stupidity and for abuses of human rights within the Army," Korotich recalls. "Yazov then went on television and attacked the yellow press. I was in Leningrad with Y evtushenko when it happened. I was saying, in a speech, 'We'll cut the armed forces, starting with missiles and our biggest fools.' Then I got a call from Gorbachev. He shouted at me, 'Why are you criticizing Y azov?' We were at war in Afghanistan, of course, and someone had given him a verbatim transcript of what I had said in Lenin- grad right after I said it." Oddly, Afghanistan had by then be- come Ogonyok's best story, and the Army had liked the way it was handled. Among the young reporters Korotich had recruited was Art yom Borovik, who had been in Afghanistan on as- signment from a newspaper and wanted to return Borovik initially turned